Yeah, I’ve been meaning to read a City on Mars, it’s near the top of my list. I have read some excerpts from it though, and from what I’ve seen, it is trying to tackle these questions from a realistic perspective, but it does also seem overly pessimistic at times.

Btw, your username is awesome.

Maggy for short, I’m sure of it.

Space mining can absolutely cause asteroids strikes. It only hasn’t done it yet because we haven’t done any asteroid mining yet. A big part of asteroid mining operations will likely be asteroid herding, bringing all the asteroids you want to the same place where they can be processed. But moving asteroids around is a potentially dangerous activity.

That said, space is really really really big… It’s really hard for two things to hit each other on accident. If you’re collecting asteroids at a high earth orbit, the chance of them accidentally hitting earth instead is extremely low. You have to miss your target by over 100,000 miles. Which would be… a monumental failure.

I think it would be a good idea to start colonizing space before “we have our shit figured out on earth”, since you know, that will never actually happen. We will have wars on earth for all eternity, we should colonize and explore space anyway.

Honestly, I strongly believe that striving to make space habitats work is one of the things that will finally teach us what we need to know to live sustainably on earth. The thing is, an affordable space colony is one that recycles almost everything, one that works mostly as a closed loop, a sustainable bubble. So in other words, if you know how to survive in a space colony, you know how to live without destroying the earth. And extreme sustainability is really the natural goal with any large space colony. Unfortunately nobody is really trying to do that here on earth, the funding, the engineering, it just isn’t happening. But if we start seriously attempting habitats in space, then people will be attempting that somewhere… And once we figure out how to do it, it can be reapplied to life on earth.

Or you could use the word we use most

A fuck-fuck